MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff, whose reporting on migrant children a shelter in Texas helped make the issue of separating children from their families a national news story, appeared on AM Joy Saturday and called “B.S.” on President Donald Trump‘s claims that his administration’s policy is the fault of Democrats.

“The first thing that a shelter official said to us when we went inside was, ‘Can you please smile at the kids? They feel like animals locked up in cages being looked at,'” Soboroff said. “And it was a strange thing to say because relatively speaking the conditions are actually pretty good there in that Casa Padre shelter in Brownsville, Texas.”

He explained:

Nobody is in cages. Nobody is in fences. You have a ton of licensed professional social care workers and clinicians and medical care professionals. Because remember this facility was opened in 2017 to deal with a phenomenon that had been happening for a long time in the United States. Unaccompanied minors coming to seek asylum and refuge from Central America.

“The reason it’s overflowing today is because of this systematic policy put into place by the Trump administration, zero tolerance, to rip children apart from their families,” Soboroff said. “It is a manufactured crisis, it is a self-inflicted crisis that doesn’t need to be happening.”

“And by the way, it’s complete B.S. to hear the president, the attorney general, Sarah Huckabee Sanders say there’s nothing new about this, nothing unusual about this, or it’s the Democrat’s policy,” Soboroff continued. “This has never ever been done before as a systematic policy to take kids away from their parents at the rate of 100%, is the goal of the Trump administration. It’s just never been done before. It’s reminiscent of Native American children being taken away from their parents, or children separated from their families at Japanese internment camps. This is not an immigration policy we’ve seen before from the federal government.”